Feeling safe to speak up: Leaders improving employee wellbeing through psychological safety

Emma Clarke, Katharina Näswall, Annick Masselot and Sanna Malinen
Additional contact information
Katharina Näswall: University of Canterbury, School of Psychology, Speech & Hearing, New Zealand
Annick Masselot: University of Canterbury, School of Law, New Zealand
Sanna Malinen: University of Canterbury, School of Business, New Zealand

Economic and Industrial Democracy, 2025, vol. 46, issue 1, 152-176

Abstract: Leaders play an integral role in developing psychologically safe workplaces. To better understand the mechanisms that transmit leadership behaviors and the broader employee wellbeing outcomes as a result, more insight in high-demand, hierarchical working environments is necessary. In this article the authors explore psychological safety as a mechanism through which leadership influences wellbeing and employee experience in the context of New Zealand legal practice. Law firms are often hierarchical in nature, potentially creating power differences which can prevent employees from speaking up, and where employees are known to experience poor wellbeing. To test the hypothesized relationships, a time-lagged study design was used with surveys tested at two timepoints on 89 lawyers working in law firms. Results showed that psychological safety mediates the relationship between leadership and both positive and negative aspects of employee experience (general wellbeing, intrapersonal wellbeing, job satisfaction, self-reported performance, incivility, and burnout).

Keywords: Employee experience; employee wellbeing; ethical leadership; psychological safety; social learning (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0143831X231226303 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:ecoind:v:46:y:2025:i:1:p:152-176

DOI: 10.1177/0143831X231226303

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Economic and Industrial Democracy from Department of Economic History, Uppsala University, Sweden
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().